Headquartered in San Diego Smartfi home loanActive primarily as a wholesale lender in the reverse mortgage space, the company will launch a retail division offering reverse mortgage products and has hired industry veteran Paul Fiore as its president of retail sales.
“I’m excited to announce that I have begun my new role as president of retail sales for Smartfi Home Loans,” Fiore said in a social media post on Monday. “Join a team of highly accomplished professionals building a retail store from the ground up.” The platform is an incredible opportunity.”
Fiore was recently in American Financial (FOA) after acquiring his long-time employer American Consulting Group (AAG) sees a unique opportunity to build a new retail segment in the industry from the ground up. He expressed his excitement about the opportunity in an interview house lineReverse Mortgage Daily (RMD).
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Fiore described a sense of possibility after leaving FOA.
“In early June, I basically had the opportunity — for the first time in 15 years — to explore market opportunities and think about how I was going to move forward,” he said. “I definitely knew I wanted to stay in the reverse mortgage industry. I was still passionate about what we were doing and the future potential we still had. I looked into the situation, started thinking about what would be the best fit for me, and started discussions with Smartfi .
Early on in those conversations, Fiore said he felt Smartfi was a good fit for him.
“To me, the most successful working relationships are those where you connect with the people you’re going to work with and share a vision for the future,” he said. “Through multiple conversations with various people across the organization, many of whom I know because they are industry veterans, it was clear that they shared a common vision for the future.”
He officially became the company’s president of retail on July 29, giving him the opportunity to build the retail division from the ground up. This is because Smartfi currently only operates as a reverse wholesale lender. Fiore explained that a degree of symbiosis between existing wholesale channels and new retail channels is critical to the company’s future growth.
“When you have a retail platform and a wholesale platform that can work together, it’s an overall benefit to the organization,” Fiore said. “When you build a retail platform from the ground up, starting with the basic technology and infrastructure, innovation happens. You have to think about where the market is going, where the borrowers are going and how they want to transact.
He added that keeping the market trajectory and borrower preferences in mind will be key in building out the new sector. Changes in the industry and reverse mortgage borrowers are also important.
“Borrowers today are very different from borrowers ten years ago,” he said.
Ground floor
Fiore said he’s excited to get into the ground floor of a brand new division, which he said feels similar to his early days at AAG. As a first step, before a company can begin recruiting staff, including loan officers, a thorough evaluation of tools such as the technology stack and the organization’s general workflow needs to be conducted.
If a company moves too quickly and hires a local liaison officer before a mechanic is identified, the results may not be ideal, he said.
“To me, it’s not just about hiring a bunch of loan officers and starting selling loans,” he said. “You do everyone a disservice in this situation. To me, building from the ground up really means sitting down, meeting with compliance, meeting with technology and learning all the different systems – how they work today jobs and how they need to be implemented in retail – all that good stuff.
Fiore will also reunite with former AAG colleague Kim Smith, who joined Smartfi last year as senior vice president of wholesale lending. He said being able to renew an established working relationship would aid Fiore’s efforts to build a new retail division.
As for the reverse mortgage industry adding a new retail player, Fiore said he hopes his colleagues at other companies are excited about the prospect.
“Our future success as an industry depends on new players entering the space and existing players expanding the market with thoughtful, innovative messaging,” he said. “I hope people see this in a positive way because my goal has always been to contribute to the industry. I think as leaders we should all be thinking about how to expand this market. For today’s customer base , this product is more important than ever.
Fiore remains a strong industry advocate for the product and his colleagues, he said.
“I support and support all my former colleagues to succeed because I think the industry needs that. So the more players the better,” he explained.
